Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Dead Again: The World’s A Stage

I suspect that there will never be a consensus on what “role playing” is in an MMO. There are simply too many players, each with an opinion and history. That’s not a bad thing, but it does make playing a role in one of these MMO things an exercise in filtering and careful deliberation. (Of course, you could always go with “roll playing” and call it a day.)

To one degree or another, we are all merely players, each acting out our own fantasies, oblivious to the rest of the game world and even the real world. Some of us are soloists, content simply to explore the stage and the setting, while others are only complete if they are with other players, content to ignore everything around them, so long as they company is good. Some have…different goals. Whatever the case, we’re all putting on a character, acting out whatever fantasies we may want to indulge in given our chosen game. That’s all well and good, until opinions clash. That’s inevitable in an MMO, even though the communities aren’t always what one might call “massive”. (Shamus wins again with a great article on that one…) At some point, you’re going to run into someone who isn’t doing it right, and you’re just going to have to move on by.

Wolfshead, Psychochild, Jay, Spinks, Jason, Chris, Scott and many others have written about Role Playing in one form or another, with more experience in the trenches. These illustrious folk are better reference than I for this topic, and I wholly welcome any other links to great references. There have to be bloggers who dive into this sort of thing. Take Ratshag, Orc extraordinaire, for example. Of course, I’m talking more about the layer removed from that sort of fun, but still, there are better sites than mine to check out for role playing.

Since I tend to dig into the “why” and “how” more than the “what” and “how to”, let me diverge a bit.

I’m an artist in the game industry. It’s my job to figure out how to make these game things look fantastic. When I fire up a game, easily half the time I’m “playing”, I’m actually taking screenshots and looking at how other artists have solved issues that I’ve either wrangled with in the past or am looking forward to handling. The first time I played WoW, at the behest of a friend at work (then Headgate Studios), I fired up a Tauren Shaman because I wanted to see how those massive characters animated (I should have played a Druid; more bang for the buck). I spent a couple of hours looking at water in the game, trying to see if I could make the lakes in Tiger Woods PGA Tour games look as good as or better than Stonebull Lake. I took hundreds of screenshots.

An interesting stage can almost tell its own story, or make it so that everyone can tease something out of it, according to their interests. If, on the other hand, the stage is little more than a platform with a few props, players are only left with interaction to fuel interest. Neither is necessarily wrong, but devs really need to be aware of what they are trying to accomplish and why, so that they can set the stage properly.

Even a sandbox game should have some toys to play with. To me, sandbox games are more toolbox than litter box. They are about crafting a setting with nooks and crannies to explore, and way to do so. When and how is up to the player, but there is still stuff there to explore.

To me, it’s easier to imagine a role within a world that has a history, a good sense of place, and things to see and do all over the place. I couldn’t be a pacifist in Modern Warfare 2 or Gears of War, for example. That role is simply unavailable to me, no matter how much I’d like to play it.

Similarly, I wasn’t able to play an undead-phobe Forsaken in WoW. The structure simply isn’t there. I can’t attack my own faction (outside of duels, but that’s so… proper for someone in a blind fear-fueled rage) or try to rejoin the Scarlet Crusade. The battle lines are drawn, and I’m For the Horde, whether or not I like it. I also couldn’t understand most Alliance characters (despite having been one)… with a few odd exceptions.

So, the WoW RP stage is there, but given the lore tangles and structural strictures, it’s just not enough of a freeform stage for me to do what I’d like to. Then again, it’s not like I’m in the game for the long run anyway.

Of course, comparing this to Allods Online as I did while playing, it’s not like that game is any better for free form role playing. The Empire and the League are similarly divided, and there are only two servers; no RP-specific realms. Playing a trio of Gibberlings can be fun, and has RP potential (like the Arisen techno-undead have potential), but since you’re surrounded by all sorts of players without even the structure of an RP server, you’re dealing with even more static to filter.

Also, as has been noted before, how many people even really bother with Role Playing on a Role Playing server in WoW? More than once, I’ve noted people suggesting that role playing is stronger in text MUDs. That’s an interesting artifact of the game design, perhaps, since players have to imagine more of the stage. I suspect that tends to either increase immersion (via investment) or blow it out of the water.

…

We could also take a step back and ask “What is one of these RPG things, anyway?” Jay and Gareth have bandied this about a bit thisaway:

With such a variable definition of what these RPGs are in the first place, perhaps it’s no wonder that RP itself is such an ill-defined beastie.

Though… perhaps that’s as it should be. Leave it up to the players, and craft a spectacular stage for them to play on. In the end, they want to play, after all, and it’s their role. Why not step out of the spotlight as devs, and just be the stage hands? Let the players play.

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In building areas for my Neverwinter Nights, these tips are helpful to the aesthetic, and should apply in any level design:

Nature vs. Civilization – Every inch of the world began as a natural site, and has been touched in some way by someone along the way. Include plants, bugs, and birds in the densest of cities; and pawprints, ancient broken statues, and some old trash in the most hidden of jungles.

Colorful Lighting – Try to give the whole map a subtle rainbow quality to it, so every room the characters enter has its own feeling.

Tell a story with objects – If this room is owned by an evil sorcerer that’s trying to hide his schemes, it should be decorated as such…Suscpicious gothic decor, something that may be a secret passage, fine furnishings to show that he has gained great advantage in his evil-doings, and perhaps a book left out on the desk to show that he has been preparing for his next evil scheme through research. Imagine who lives there, and what they’ve been up to since they’ve occupied the site. And if anyone occupied it before them, is there any evidence left of that?

Minimum size – don’t leave big open spaces unless there’s something to see at each step.

Diversify – Use lots of various terrain details, don’t just fall back on one thing.

Avoid symmetry – If it was built symmetrically, then by golly, make the pillar on the right side busted and the torch on the left unlit! Roads should wind around, not be straight. Put a bridge and a river 2/3rds way along.

Well, what I’m taking from your pattern of roleplaying is that you take a hard coded premise of the setting, and then you try utterly to play a role against it.

I’d suggest playing a tauren who hates nature, except I think you want to play against a premise that everyone cares about – ie, being a fighting soldier in modern warfare, or an undead trying to rejoin the living side.

Except they are all hard coded as actual rules.

Also, would it have been that interesting? Imagine if your undead girl had rejoined the scarlet crusade – and their leery of her but basically accept her and…what? The whole zing of an undead girl wanting to rejoin with live humans all went away. You don’t want her to just rejoin them and it all goes smoothly. There is no zing to your undead girl or pacifist soldier if things just go absolutely smoothly. Your undead girl getting back in would be like Michael getting back into his organisation in burn notice in the first episode.

Though I totally grant things not happening AT ALL isn’t things running non smoothly, it’s just nothing happening.

I think your being attracted to roleplay against the hard coded rules because everyone finds the horde/alliance thing so important, or the fighting so important in modern warfare.

I think you need a game where people find a premise important, and yet that premise is not hard coded into the rules. In which case people care about the premise not because it mechanically gets in their way of obtaining shinies, but because they just give a damn about the premise to begin with.

I do alot of table top roleplay design investigation and this is kind of at the cutting edge right now.

I certainly have a reflexive impulse to explore the road not taken, but it’s not so much a drive to run contrary to the designers’ intent so much as it is a desire to explore possibilities and potential. I suppose I also have a deep distaste for stereotypes, and want to challenge assumptions.

I didn’t expect rejoining the Scarlet Crusade to be anything other than exploring the potential life story of a character who has been turned into the thing she hated most, and then her attempts to deal with it. Whether that led to redemption or despair, I didn’t know, but I was thwarted at the gate, as it were. That certainly led to other story opportunities, just not what I’d hoped to explore. (Not that I expected such in WoW, but still…)

I’m not really in the market for a tabletop game these days, but if you have recommendations for study, I’m all for investigating.

“I certainly have a reflexive impulse to explore the road not taken, but it’s not so much a drive to run contrary to the designers’ intent so much as it is a desire to explore possibilities and potential.”

Are you sure? I got the same impression that you went out of your way to try to break the setting. Now obv in a face to face game, it wouldn’t be a problem — there are always some players who stubbornly do whatever they think the GM doesn’t want them to do and a good GM can run with it.

But coded computer games don’t give you that flexibility. If you want to play a pacifist in WoW then you can, but all the actual gameplay is about killing things. So you’ve just talked yourself out of actually playing the game. Similarly, WoW doesn’t give you the ability to betray your own faction. If you want to do that, it’s really the wrong game to do it in.

I think I’ve said this before but my advice to RPers who are determined to RP in MMOs is to work with what the game gives you.

Trouble is … you need to actually play the game to really understand the background well enough to do that. I noticed this in CoH — more experienced players had cool backgrounds which fitted in with established NPC groups. New players (like me) had to go with a more generic sort of feel. And even if we thought up really cool backgrounds, we just weren’t able to tweak them to include NPC groups cos we didn’t know anything about them.

Honestly, I am not really convinced of full Sandboxes. like an adventure playground for grown-ups. Perhaps being to suborn for free unfolding, I still think a little guidance is needed. Like a set number of realms or cities, either prospering or struggling, due to how the population uses limited resources, and looking how they solve the problem. Fights, diplomacy, alliances, Empires, trades …

Roleplaying is a sort of conviction, inherently in everyone in different development. It requires at least respect, which should be a common social practice for everyone.
I am not a Role Player, but whenever I encounter someone I least I do not try to interrupt him, usually keeping regular language (no l33d or whatever absurdity) is enough.
Spinks is right about different levels of expectation, limiting the experience of role playing, but aside from the main stream, where community management is literary, you probably reduce said problem.

Spinks, I was following what, to me, was a logical thread in the Forsaken lore. The whole point of the Forsaken is that they aren’t your typical undead. They are typically humans who caught the “undead plague” from WC3, and subsequently used their personal willpower to break free from the Lich King. (Perhaps with Sylvanas’ help.) They are in a friendship of convenience with the Horde, not truly “For The Horde” in the way that the other three races are. Some Forsaken certainly embrace the dark side, but others remember and actually miss their former life. From what I read, some Forsaken even try to reclaim their “lost” life. Apparently, there is even one who holds high rank in the Scarlet Crusade, as he did in life. Some still hope for a cure.

Yes, the formal WoW game mechanics prevent a player from walking the same path, but my point is that it would be consistent with the lore. This is a case where the lore directly contradicts the mechanics. I can understand why from a strict game design standpoint, to be sure, but again, that’s what I’m getting at. The game design is set against this angle of role playing, internally conflicted with the game’s own lore.

I chose a Forsaken because I agreed to after Ixo’s suggestion. If I were going to role play completely based on my own preferences, I’d go back to the Tauren like I played years ago, and probably have little trouble with the lore.

That, of course, also brings to mind the question: how does one approach role playing? Is it lore based or mechanic based? There’s no right answer, of course, but one certainly works better in a digital setting. I can’t help but be a little disappointed with that limitation of the medium. (Tabletop games have their own version of this, of course… but yes, a good GM can roll with it.)

Also, does one role play completely based on personal preference, or try to squeeze interest out of a given role? Limitations at character creation (in my case, being a Forsaken was a given, so I tried to find something interesting in it, rather than playing my preference) or GM-imposed (game design imposed) can make for interesting roles to play… or internal tension. Maybe that just means I’m a bad role player, but I’d like to think that I was trying to explore the lore. I certainly spent several hours studying the Forsaken and assorted WoW history before ever creating my character. I came at it with my own spin, to be sure, but it was rooted in the lore, not trying to “break the game”.

I don’t mean that you are a bad role player, but if you choose to explore a side to the character which is opposite to that supported by the coded gameplay then you are really really dependent on finding other players who want to RP the same thing.

My advice is to allow your concept to be modified by how the game plays and what you OOCly enjoy doing in it. If you can do this, you will have more fun and feel less frustrated. So maybe your character can still hate all forsaken but you need to find a way for the character to internalise the rage into bitterness and scorn and sulk as you go along with the only faction who will have you (or something like that). That would fit.

I’m not taking offense in any way, just noting that I may well not be very good at this, or that my exploration and focus on lore just doesn’t work in this setting. That’s more or less what I’m getting at; I’m not really accusing Blizzard of incompetence, just noting that their design doesn’t work for some sorts of role playing. Every game has limits, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Nor, as I’ve noted, is it unique to WoW.)

Thanks for chiming in, by the way. 🙂

The Forsaken really are kind of a lore/mechanic mess, though. That’s the inherent risk in a “race” that is comprised of faction expatriots, mostly against their will. They really do have storytelling potential, but the constraints of design don’t leave much room.

I think you are fine, and you did perceive right away how a game’s structure makes serious RPing impossible. RPing is what you do in chat while you play the game the way the designers intended.

Sadly, Fallen Earth to me looks like it would be the one game where you actually could roleplay within structure. You choose to join factions, they are fluid and not hardcoded, and you aren’t even limited to combat: you can level and gain AP from crafting or gathering. But people just don’t roleplay in it from what I see.

“That, of course, also brings to mind the question: how does one approach role playing? Is it lore based or mechanic based? There’s no right answer”

No…there is!

You can’t play lore. If you could just play the lore without buying the game, you wouldn’t have bought the game (or installed it if you got it for free).

Mechanics almost always give you something like the flags at the beach. It’s safe to swim between the flags. Whatever parts of lore fits between the flags (the whole of the lore will not fit, of course), you can engage [i]through[/i] the game mechanics.

But you keep trying to swim outside the flags and then you get caught in a rip.

Anyway, my base premise is that you can’t play lore by itself, naked and raw. Otherwise if you could, no one would bother making games, would they?

Perhaps that depends on how you define “play”. If play has to be structured and based on a ruleset, then yes. If play doesn’t need rules, then yes, you can play lore by itself.

Or, perhaps viewed another way, “playing lore” is merely the ruleset that players themselves define, rather than the devs.

See, this is what I’m getting at with the heart of the article. Let players define how they play their roles, and stop trying to shoehorn them into what the dev thinks is the “proper” way to play. Define a stage, and let players set up their own ways to play.

To be sure, devs can set up what they think is good as a framework for those who don’t want to do the work of making their own rules, but trying to herd everyone into the same roles makes for unsatisfying role playing. (Though it can be perfectly fine “gaming”; see Uncharted 2, FFXIII or any other tightly scripted game.)

It’s all about ownership and agency. Do players own their roles, or do the devs? Can players make choices, or do they just go through the motions? I argue that devs own the stage and props, but the players should own the roles and the play, free to define them however they would like. There could and probably should be rules in place to keep people from abusing others, but they should be free to go off into those riptides if they feel like it.

You really can’t do this ‘how you define it’ thing – you are, under your own motivation with the intent of play, walking up to a thing which is a huge, huge bunch of programmed rules, then your saying ‘is play really about rules?’.

We can’t go there – as in I wont go there. Your either walking up to a big bunch of rules because actually for you play IS about rules and this defining stuff is essentially a snow job to both of us OR when your walking up to a big clump of rules, your making a mistake in doing so because it’s not what you want and you need to acknowledge your own mistake on that, or this isn’t talking.

Then you’ve moved onto roles – which is a different subject entirely by my measure. Pluck captain kirk out of star trek and put him into buffy the vampire slayer…roles and lore are indipendent of each other entirely. You can pluck and character from one lore and pop him into another lore and the character just reacts and lives still. Lore and roleplay are not the same thing, no matter how intertwined they seem historically.

And I basically disagree. I think a game, as in it’s mechanics, can be focused entirely on just a handful of character types – and benefit from that! You could have game A where you play backstabbing rat catchers who drink too much and game B where your elves who care for the forests, but conflict of which type of trees should be protected most.

But someone trying to say ‘No, I OWN MY CHARACTER…so I’m going to play a back stabbing rat catcher in the elf game!’

It’s silly! People should choose a game that fits the role they want to play out, rather than play a game that is not suited to the role at all then blaming the game for that indiscrepancy.

We should have more games that look into many different roles. Instead of people trying to jam whatever their chosen role is into EVE or world of warcraft, etc.

Though I’ll grant that EVE and WOW both try and pretend to be all things to all men, as if they can handle all roles. They can’t. This isn’t a problem with mechanics, though, it’s a problem with false advertising.

“Let players define how they play their roles, and stop trying to shoehorn them into what the dev thinks is the “proper” way to play.”

(Sorry for necroing this, I just find it fascinating.)

I think this is a great idea and I’d love more freedom to define how I play my role. But there are real limits in the medium to what is possible.

Some sandbox style games will offer more choice (and the illusion of even more choice than is given) but even EVE locks out just about any interesting cultural roles or even interesting day to day jobs other than flying around and shooting stuff or being a trader.

The other thing is that even in a totally freeform pen and paper game where you could play any role, people will still come up with concepts where the GM will say ‘sorry, that’s not going to work in this game.’ (Generally the idea is that the GM should discuss the scope and theme of the game with players before they create characters but even if you say ‘I’d like all your characters to know each other because they come from the same town’, someone will think up a totally unrelated concept.)

Ugh, hit return too soon. I think that sometimes accepting restrictions can guarantee that your character can fit into the game world smoothing. Because no character exists in a vacuum. I’d love more freedom than we get right now, but I really dont’ know if it is feasible.

You’re probably right in that it’s not really feasible. There’s a marvelous flexibility with a live GM around a table that we’re just not going to get in an MMO. I think it’s worth trying to make more flexibility, but then, I don’t have millions to make a game…